Many individuals, businesses, and organizations occasionally have a need for custom materials, such as birth announcements, party invitations, product or service brochures, promotional postcards, personalized holiday cards, or any number of other items. Some of these individuals and businesses turn to sources such as a local print shop for assistance in preparing the materials. Those having access to a suitable computer may perform the product design process themselves using any of the various specialized software products available for purchase and installation on an appropriate computer system or by using a Web-based printing service provider that takes advantage of the capabilities of the Web and modern Web browsers to provide document design services from any computer with Web access at whatever time and place is convenient to the user. Computerized systems typically provide their customers with the ability to access and view pre-designed product templates and enter information to create a customized product design.
The use of pre-designed electronic product templates imposes limitations and constraints on the flexibility of the product design system and its usefulness to many customers. Traditionally, the template provider has individually designed each template by defining various details of the template, such as the size and position of all image and text areas in the template; selecting, cropping and positioning images; defining colors to be used for template elements having a color attribute, and so forth. The template designer adjusts the various elements until the designer is satisfied with the overall appearance of the template. User editing is usually limited to allowing the user to add, modify and position text and perhaps upload images to be added to the product design.
Not only is this prior art individual template design method time consuming and a significant expense for the template provider, in several ways it limits the service providers ability to fully satisfy the desires and requirements of its customers. For example, a template provider may have many electronic images that it would like to make available for use by its customers, but the template provider may only have the resources to produce a limited number of template variations, leaving many images unused and unavailable to customers. In addition, the size and shape of various products offered by the template provider requires that the template provider make image cropping decisions regarding the portion of an image that will be incorporated into a particular product design. The image cropping decision made by the template provider may not be pleasing to all users and some potential customers may be dissatisfied and choose not to complete a product design. As yet another drawback, many potential customers have their own images that they would like to use in a product design in the place of the image provided by the template provider, but they have traditionally had no way of making the substitution in a properly cropped fashion.
Prior art desktop publishing applications having image cropping tools that allow a user to modify images in a document being designed are known in the art, but these prior art cropping operations are typically processed as completely independent operations that are unrelated to and unconstrained by any specific layout or design requirements of the related document. The user is allowed to crop the image in any manner or height to width ratio that the user chooses.
Cropping tools that maintain a fixed ratio between the height and width of the cropped image are known in connection with some photograph printing Web sites that allow a user to upload the user's digital photographs and order printed copies. For example, a user may upload the user's digital picture and specify one of a limited number of standard photograph print sizes, such as 5×7 or 6×8. The Web site will display a cropping indicator having the appropriate ratio of height to width corresponding to the selected print size. The cropping indicator can be positioned and resized by the user while the ratio of the height to width will remain fixed. This is a completely independent cropping operation that is focused solely and narrowly on photographic prints without a notion of layout or design requirements of an associated document or electronic product.
There is a need for a flexible electronic product editing and customization system that allows a product template designer to offer a wide variety of electronic product designs incorporating a substantially unlimited variety of images of various height to width ratios while simultaneously allowing the user to readily and easily re-crop the images in the product design, or select, substitute and properly crop alternate images, in a manner that maintains compatibility with the product design layout.